Sunday, 24th of April, 2011

Hope you’re enjoying this long long weekend!
Note: I’m away again next week, playing at the Fairbridge Festival in WA, so Shannon O’Neill’s stepping in again to keep you entertained.
LISTEN AGAIN to this week’s show after the playlist.

Starting once again with the amazing sax of Colin Stetson, from his second album. One of the albums of the year, multiphonic rhythmic live saxophone manipulation, and on this track the spoken words of Laurie Anderson and the beautiful singing of Shara Worden.

And then the first of a few samplings tonight from what I’m certain will be another of the albums of the year, jenny hval’s first under her own name, viscera. Released on the iconic Rune Grammofon label in her home country of Norway, it’s another step forward from the material she released as Rockettothesky. Uncompromising on all fronts – lyrics, production and arrangements, songwriting, vocal approach. It ranges from quiet folk and experimental musings with half-spoken words to full-on shoegazey/gothy rock. Wonderful.

Grails are continuing to explore the somewhat psychedelic throwback rock they’re known for, and it’s always excellent. We took the first track from their new album, and it’s riff-tastic.

Next up in the rockologue, Italian postrocker ensemble Stearica Invade Acid Mothers Temple. Recorded at the end of a tour by the Japanese psych-rockers, it sounds like Stearica had a lot of fun re-tooling the AMT sound to their own purposes.

And it’s not all that much of a jump from there to the heavy, heavy d’n’b/breakcore of Submerged. Fresh from his Blood of Heroes collaboration, the Ohm Resistance boss features some of those collaborators on his new album, which as usual is extremely loud and heavy, with lashings of rock guitars. From his first album we heard squalls of free jazz trumpet over his beats.

And then another sampling from DJ Hidden’s excellent Semiomime side project. Not-so-heavy drum’n’bass with a quasi-classical tilt.

And it’s always awesome to hear new tunes from Icarus. In the lead up to their new album coming out this year, this is from a split EP with Danish nano-jazz group Badun. The bands swapped synth samples and ended up with a very cohesive sounding EP with two tracks each. Icarus maintain the fucked-up drum’n’bass basis with some nice warm synth pads in the background of the chaos.

Continuing the theme, perhaps, of dance/electronic music reinterpreted, the new Hauschka album sees Volker Bertelmann using his prepared piano and strings in a more rhythmic way than usual. It doesn’t exactly sound like techno (let alone house), as the promo sheet suggests, but it’s clearly influenced by music from that direction as much as the post-classical world he usually inhabits. Lovely stuff.
In between, I played the fantastic Vert remix from a long way back.

I played a couple of tracks from the new epic45 album last week. It’s up there with their best releases, pastoral indie/postrock/shoegaze, with electronic touches. I wanted to give them a little feature as they’ve never really gotten the attention they deserve, and as we heard, there’s plenty of meat to their back catalogue.

You might not have heard much of the new album from restream, and that’s because it’s four tracks, each around 10 minuts long. But that’s no challenge for Utility Fog, and with tracks this good it’s a must: guitars and electronic beats make for blissed-out shoegaze. His previous album was shoegazey too, albeit less epic.

There’s a certain amount of shoegazeyness to the new Underlapper, along with their usual postrock and electronic outbursts. My cello’s on about 5 tracks on the album (including the one I played tonight), but I’ve been a fan even of these very songs longer than that, and I can say objectively that it’s a wonderful release.

For Record Store Day, Radiohead released a limited 12″ with two exclusive tracks. It’ll apparently get wider release later in the year, which is good because these are adventurous tracks that any fan shouldn’t be without. Not much in the way of melody, but if you find that off-putting at this point then maybe Radiohead’s not your band?

More wondrousness from jenny hval leads into the last two artist specials of the night: south of Norway we find Sweden’s Tape, whose first album in a few years finds them in pretty recognizable territory, as indeed the older tracks demonstrate: but it’s the kind of place you’re always happy to visit — easygoing postrock with occasional biting noise to keep you on your toes.

And Deaf Center deserve a little of their older material to be heard too. The Helios remix is just lovely, and we had one track from 2005’s Pale Ravine. I do feel, though, that their new album Owl Splinters is an amazing step into the vanguard, growling cello and sparkling piano creating something pretty unusual for the drone world. Ben Frost is perhaps a point of comparison. The album’s a grower — give it the attention it requires and it’s all-immersing.

Labels and artists!

email: utilityfog at frogworth dot com
Utility Fog teeters on the cusp between acoustic and electronic, organic and digital. Constantly changing and rearranging, this aural cloud of nanotech consumes genres and spits them out in new forms. Whether cataloguing the jungle resurgence, tracking the ups and downs of noise and drone, or unearthing the remnants of glitch and folktronica, all is contextualised within artist & genre histories for a fulfilling sonic journey.
Since all these genre names are already pretty ridiculous, we thought we'd coin a new one. So "postfolkrocktronica" it is. Wear it.